Internal Memo: Lady Gaga

Postmodernity has culminated in my torn underwear. The fragmentation of my fishnets signals the teetering of a mode of authority that was in the end so much bad romance. In the depthlessness of my stare heralds equality in superficiality, and digitality allows my hair to be everywhere. The utopian gesture has in my heels undergone a fundamental mutation. We are a convergence of meat freaks. What has capitalism done for us lately?

My crotch is a zone of mystery. It is at once a locus of force and a void. It is the site of the eighth type of ambiguity, one William Empson could never have dreamed up. My crotch is not a metaphor; you can't say that it's like anything else. It is not a place where meanings are resolved or a context that connects two ideas for which there is one word, like box, which can mean container or punch. My crotch will never make clear your complicated state of mind. You'll always be as confused as the writers who write about me, like Camille Paglia, who called me the end of sex, when I am merely its continuation, or at least my crotch is. Or is it? My crotch is silent on the matter, and no idea you invent will help you. My crotch and I are united, and the ambiguity is endless.

I am the vanishing mediator, but the lady never vanishes. My vulgarity is polished enough to abolish class. My ass manifests itself in stages of subjection, alienation, paranoia, narcissism and revolution. Its functional value is scatological, its exchange value colossal, its symbolic value conjugal, its sign value nonsensical.

Some have called me a crypto-normativist, clutching tight to the very Enlightenment I claim to be tearing to shreds. The truth, or should I say, the Real, is otherwise. What little is left of the so-called Enlightenment lies prostrate at the mercy of me.

Either all that, or I'm just a nice Catholic girl who went to Sacred Heart.